Thoreau walden essay questions

Spring and Conclusion Summary: Spring With the coming of April, the ice begins to melt from Walden Pond, creating a thunderous roar in which Thoreau delights. Thoreau mentions an old man he knows—whose wisdom, Thoreau says, he could not rival if he lived to be as old as Methuselah—who was struck with terror by the crash of the melting ice despite his long experience with the ways of nature. Thoreau describes it as a kind of universal meltdown, heralding total change.

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Walden Pond The meanings of Walden Pond are various, and by the end of the work this small body of water comes to symbolize almost everything Thoreau holds dear spiritually, philosophically, and personally.

From the SparkNotes Blog

Certainly it symbolizes the alternative to, and withdrawal from, social conventions and obligations. But it also symbolizes the vitality and tranquility of nature. A clue to the symbolic meaning of the pond lies in two of its aspects that fascinate Thoreau: Thoreau is so intrigued by the question of how deep Walden Pond is that he devises a new method of plumbing depths to measure it himself, finding it no more than a hundred feet deep.

Wondering why people rumor that the pond is bottomless, Thoreau offers a spiritual explanation: He suggests that the pond is not just a natural phenomenon, but also a metaphor for spiritual belief.

How to Bring Your Voice to Life in Personal Essays

Thoreau devotes much attention in his narrative to the behavior patterns of woodchucks, partridges, loons, and mice, among others. Yet his animal writing does not sound like the notes of a naturalist; there is nothing truly scientific or zoological in Walden, for Thoreau personalizes nature too much.

The resemblance between animals and humans also works in the other direction, as when Thoreau describes the townsmen he sees on a trip to Concord as resembling prairie dogs. His very personal relationship with animals demonstrates that in his solitary stay at the pond, he is making more connections, not fewer, with other beings around him.

Ice Since ice is the only product of Walden Pond that is useful, it becomes a symbol of the social use and social importance of nature, and of the exploitation of natural resources.

Character Worksheets

He describes in great detail the Irish icemen who arrive from Cambridge in the winter of to cut, block, and haul away 10, tons of ice for use in city homes and fancy hotels.

The ice-cutters are the only group of people ever said to arrive at Walden Pond en masse, and so they inevitably represent society in miniature, with all the calculating exploitations and injustices that Thoreau sees in the world at large. Consequently, the labor of the icemen on Walden becomes a symbolic microcosm of the confrontation of society and nature.

At first glance it would appear that society gets the upper hand, as the frozen pond is chopped up, disfigured, and robbed of ten thousand tons of its contents. But nature triumphs in the end, since less than twenty-five percent of the ice ever reaches its destination, the rest melting and evaporating en route—and making its way back to Walden Pond.Economy and Simple Living Henry David Thoreau Walden is a series of topics, which discuss on how to live a meaningful life.

In the first chapter named Economy, he talks about the benefits of having a simple lifestyle and that luxury good are the main suppressor of humanity. The Portable Thoreau (Penguin Classics) [Henry David Thoreau, Jeffrey S.

Cramer] on pfmlures.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.

An updated edition of Thoreau's most widely read works Self-described as a mystic, a transcendentalist. A summary of Spring and Conclusion in Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Walden and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.

Henry David Thoreau wrote the essay Civil Disobedience to show his opposition to slavery and American imperialism.

His essay has influenced many prominent civil rights activists, including Dr.

Walden, in fullWalden; or, Life in the Woods, series of 18 essays by Henry David Thoreau, published in An important contribution to New England Transcendentalism, the book was a record of Thoreau’s experiment in simple living on the northern shore of Walden Pond in eastern Massachusetts (–47).

General Overviews. While anthropocentrism has received attention as a subject worthy of full-length treatments, in many cases overviews are written with an eye toward a specific framing of an environmental or other problem, such as, for instance, animal rights.